Till We Have Faces

  That moment I resolved to write this book. For years now my old quarrel with the gods had slept. I had come into Bardia’s way of thinking; I no longer meddled with them. Often, though I had seen a god myself, I was near to believing that there are no such things. The memory of his voice and face was kept in one of those rooms of my soul that I didn’t lightly unlock. Now, instantly, I knew I was facing them—I with no strength and they with all; I visible to them, they invisible to me; I easily wounded (already so wounded that all my life had been but a hiding and staunching of the wound), they invulnerable; I one, they many. In all these years they had only let me run away from them as far as the cat lets the mouse run. Now, snatch! and the claw on me again. Well, I could speak. I could set down the truth. What had never perhaps been done in the world before should be done now. The case against them should be written.

  Jealousy! I jealous of Psyche? I sickened not only at the vileness of the lie but at its flatness. It seemed as if the gods had minds just like the lowest of the people. What came easiest to them, what seemed the likeliest and simplest reason to put in a story, was the dull, narrow passion of the beggars’ streets, the temple-brothels, the slave, the child, the dog. Could they not lie, if lie they must, better than that?

  ‘. . . and wanders over the earth, weeping, weeping, always weeping.’ How long had the old man been going on? That one word rang in my ears as if he had repeated it a thousand times. I set my teeth and my soul stood on guard. A moment more and I should have begun to hear the sound myself again. She would have been weeping in that little wood outside the temple door.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I shouted. ‘Do you think I don’t know a girl cries when her heart breaks? Go on, go on.’

  ‘Wanders, weeping, weeping, always weeping,’ he said. ‘And falls under the power of Talapal, who hates her. And of course Ialim can’t protect her because Talapal is his mother and he’s afraid of her. So Talapal torments Istra and sets her to all manner of hard labours, things that seem impossible. But when Istra has done them all, then at last Talapal releases her, and she is reunited to Ialim and becomes a goddess. Then we take off her black veil, and I change my black robe for a white one, and we offer—’

  ‘You mean she will some day be reunited to the god; and you will take off her veil then? When is this to happen?’

  ‘We take off the veil and I change my robe in the spring.’

  ‘Do you think I care what you do? Has the thing itself happened yet or not? Is Istra now wandering over the earth or has she already become a goddess?’

  ‘But, Stranger, the sacred story is about the sacred things—the things we do in the temple. In spring, and all summer, she is a goddess. Then when harvest comes we bring a lamp into the temple in the night and the god flies away. Then we veil her. And all winter she is wandering and suffering; weeping, always weeping. . . .’

  He knew nothing. The story and the worship were all one in his mind. He could not understand what I was asking.

  ‘I’ve heard your story told otherwise, old man,’ said I. ‘I think the Sister—or the Sisters—might have more to say for themselves than you know.’

  ‘You may be sure that they would have plenty to say for themselves,’ he replied. ‘The jealous always have. Why, my own wife now—’

  I saluted him and went out of that cold place into the warmth of the wood. I could see through the trees the red light of the fire my people had already kindled. The sun had set.

  I hid all the things I was feeling—and indeed I did not know what they were, except that all the peace of that autumnal journey was shattered—so as not to spoil the pleasure of my people. Next day I understood more clearly. I could never be at peace again till I had written my charge against the gods. It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.

  And so it comes about that I can tell nothing of our journey back to Glome. There were seven or eight days of it, and we passed many notable places in Essur; and in Glome, after we had crossed the border, we saw everywhere such good peace and plenty and such duty and, I think, love towards myself as ought to have gladdened me. But my eyes and ears were shut up. All day, and often all night too, I was recalling every passage of the true story, dragging up terrors, humiliations, struggles, and anguish that I had not thought of for years, letting Orual wake and speak, digging her almost out of a grave, out of the walled well. The more I remembered, the more still I could remember—often weeping beneath my veil as if I had never been Queen, yet never in so much sorrow that my burning indignation did not rise above it. I was in haste too. I must write it all quickly before the gods found some way to silence me. Whenever, towards evening, Ilerdia pointed and said, ‘There, Queen, would be a good place for the tents,’ I said (before I had thought what I would say), ‘No, no. We can make three more miles tonight; or five.’ Every morning I woke earlier. At first I endured the waiting, fretting myself in the cold mist, listening to the deep-breathed sleep of those young sleepers. But soon my patience would serve me no longer. I took to waking them. I woke them earlier each morning. In the end we were travelling like those who fly from a victorious enemy. I became silent, and this struck the others silent too. I could see they were bewildered and all the comfort of their travels was gone. I suppose they whispered together about the Queen’s moods.

  When I reached home, even then I could not set about it as suddenly as I had hoped. All manner of petty work had piled up. And now, when I most needed help, word was sent me that Bardia was a little sick and kept his bed. I asked Arnom about Bardia’s sickness, and Arnom said, ‘It’s neither poison nor fever, Queen—a small matter for a strong man. But he’d best not rise. He’s aging, you know.’ It would have given me a thrust of fear but that I already knew (and had seen growing signs of it lately) how that wife of his cockered and cosseted him, like a hen with one chicken—not, I’d swear, through any true fears, but to keep him at home and away from the palace.

  Yet at last after infinite hindrances, I made my book and here it stands. Now, you who read, judge between the gods and me. They gave me nothing in the world to love but Psyche and then took her from me. But that was not enough. They then brought me to her at such a place and time that it hung on my word whether she should continue in bliss or be cast out into misery. They would not tell me whether she was the bride of a god, or mad, or a brute’s or villain’s spoil. They would give no clear sign, though I begged for it. I had to guess. And because I guessed wrong they punished me—what’s worse, punished me through her. And even that was not enough; they have now sent out a lying story in which I was given no riddle to guess, but knew and saw that she was the god’s bride, and of my own will destroyed her, and that for jealousy. As if I were another Redival. I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s buff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?

  I say, therefore, that there is no creature (toad, scorpion, or serpent) so noxious to man as the gods. Let them answer my charge if they can. It may well be that, instead of answering, they’ll strike me mad or leprous or turn me into beast, bird, or tree. But will not all the world then know (and the gods will know it knows) that this is because they have no answer?

  PART TWO

  I

  Not many days have passed since I wrote those words no answer, but I must unroll my book again. It would be better to rewrite it from the beginning, but I think there’s no time for that. Weakness comes on me fast, and Arnom shakes his head and tells m
e I must rest. They think I don’t know they have sent a message to Daaran.

  Since I cannot mend the book, I must add to it. To leave it as it was would be to die perjured; I know so much more than I did about the woman who wrote it. What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant. I found I must set down (for I was speaking as before judges and must not lie) passions and thoughts of my own which I had clean forgotten. The past which I wrote down was not the past that I thought I had (all these years) been remembering. I did not, even when I had finished the book, see clearly many things that I see now. The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning—only to prepare me for the gods’ surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.

  Very early in the writing there came also a stroke from without. While I related my first years, when I wrote how Redival and I built mud houses in the garden, a thousand other things came back into my mind, all about those days when there was no Psyche and no Fox—only I and Redival. Catching tadpoles in the brook, hiding from Batta in the hay, waiting at the door of the hall when our father gave a feast and wheedling titbits out of the slaves as they went in and out. And I thought, how terribly she changed. This, all within my own mind. But then the stroke from without. On top of many other hindrances came word of an embassy from the Great King who lives to the south and east.

  ‘Another plague,’ said I. And when the strangers came (and there must be hours of talk, and a feast for them afterwards) I liked them none the better for finding that their chief man was a eunuch. Eunuchs are very great men at that court. This one was the fattest man I ever saw, so fat his eyes could hardly see over his cheeks, all shining and reeking with oil, and tricked out with as much doll-finery as one of Ungit’s girls. But as he talked and talked I began to think there was a faint likeness in him to someone I had seen long ago. And, as we do, I chased it and gave it up, and chased it and gave it up again, till suddenly, when I least thought of it, the truth started into my mind and I shouted out, ‘Tarin!’

  ‘Oh yes, Queen, oh yes,’ said he, spiteful-pleased (I thought) and leering. ‘Oh yes, I was him you called Tarin. Your father did not love me, Queen, did he? But . . . te-hee, te-hee . . . he made my fortune. Oh yes, he set me on the right road. With two cuts of a razor. But for him I should not have been the great man I am now.’

  I wished him joy of his advancement.

  ‘Thank you, Queen, thank you. It is very good. And to think . . . te-hee . . . that but for your father’s temper I might have gone on carrying a shield in the guard of a little barbarous king whose whole kingdom could be put into one corner of my master’s hunting park and never be noticed! You will not be angry, no?’

  I said I had always heard that the Great King had an admirable park.

  ‘And your sister, Queen?’ said the eunuch. ‘Ah, she was a pretty little girl . . . though, te-hee, te-hee, I’ve had finer women through my hands since . . . is she still alive?’

  ‘She is the Queen of Phars,’ said I.

  ‘Ah, so. Phars. I remember. One forgets the names of all these little countries. Yes . . . a pretty little girl. I took pity on her. She was lonely.’

  ‘Lonely?’ said I.

  ‘Oh yes, yes, very lonely. After the other princess, the baby, came. She used to say, “First of all Orual loved me much; then the Fox came and she loved me little; then the baby came and she loved me not at all.” So she was lonely. I was sorry for her . . . te-hee-hee . . . Oh, I was a fine young fellow then. Half the girls in Glome were in love with me.’ I led him back to our affairs of state.

  This was only the first stroke, a light one; the first snowflake of the winter that I was entering, regarded only because it tells us what’s to come. I was by no means sure that Tarin spoke truly. I am sure still that Redival was false and a fool. And for her folly the gods themselves cannot blame me; she had that from her father. But one thing was certain: I had never thought at all how it might be with her when I turned first to the Fox and then to Psyche. For it had been somehow settled in my mind from the very beginning that I was the pitiable and ill-used one. She had her gold curls, hadn’t she?

  So back to my writing. And the continual labour of mind to which it put me began to overflow into my sleep. It was a labour of sifting and sorting, separating motive from motive and both from pretext; and this same sorting went on every night in my dreams, but in a changed fashion. I thought I had before me a huge, hopeless pile of seeds, wheat, barley, poppy, rye, millet, what not? and I must sort them out and make separate piles, each all of one kind. Why I must do it, I did not know; but infinite punishment would fall upon me if I rested a moment from my labour or if, when all was done, a single seed were in the wrong pile. In waking life a man would know the task impossible. The torment of the dream was that, there, it could conceivably be done. There was one chance in ten thousand of finishing the labour in time, and one in a hundred thousand of making no mistake. It was all but certain I should fail, and be punished—but not certain. And so to it: searching, peering, picking up each seed between finger and thumb. Yet not always finger and thumb. For in some dreams, more madly still, I became a little ant, and the seeds were as big as millstones; and labouring with all my might, till my six legs cracked, I carried them to their places—holding them in front of me as ants do, loads bigger than myself.

  One thing that shows how wholly the gods kept me to my two labours, the day’s and the night’s, is that all this time I hardly gave Bardia a thought, save to grumble at his absence because it meant that I was more hindered in my writing. While the rage of it lasted nothing seemed to matter a straw except finishing my book. Of Bardia I only said (once and again), ‘Does he mean to slug abed for the rest of his life?’ or ‘It’s that wife of his.’

  Then there came a day when that last line of the book (they have no answer) was still wet, and I found myself listening to Arnom and understanding, as if for the first time, what his looks and voice meant. ‘Do you mean,’ I cried, ‘that the Lord Bardia is in danger?’

  ‘He’s very weak, Queen,’ said the priest. ‘I wish the Fox were with us. We are bunglers, we of Glome. It seems to me that Bardia has no strength or spirit to fight the sickness.’

  ‘Good gods,’ said I, ‘why did you not make me understand this before? Ho! Slave! My horse. I will go and see him.’

  Arnom was an old and trusted counsellor now. He laid his hand on my arm. ‘Queen,’ he said gently and very gravely, ‘it would make him the less likely to recover if you now went to him.’

  ‘Do I carry such an infection about me?’ said I. ‘Is there death in my aspect, even through a veil?’

  ‘Bardia is your most loyal and most loving subject,’ said Arnom. ‘To see you would call up all his powers—perhaps crack them. He’d rouse himself to his duty and courtesy. A hundred affairs of state on which he meant to speak to you would crowd into his mind. He’d rack his brains to remember things he has forgotten for these last nine days. It might kill him. Leave him to drowse and dream. It’s his best chance now.’

  It was as bitter a truth as I’d ever tasted, but I drank it. Would I not have crouched silent in my own dungeons as long as Arnom bade me if it would add one featherweight to Bardia’s chance of life? Three days I bore it (I, the old fool, with hanging dugs and shrivelled flanks). On the fourth I said, ‘I can bear it no longer.’ On the fifth Arnom came to me, himself weeping, and I knew his tidings without words. And this is a strange folly, that what seemed to me worst of all was that Bardia had died without ever hearing what it would have shamed him to hear. It seemed to me that all would be bearable if, once only, I could have gone to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Bardia, I loved you.’

  When they laid him on the pyre I could only stand by to honour him. Because I was neither his wife nor kin, I might not wail nor beat the breast for him. Ah, if I could have beaten the breast, I would have put on steel gloves or hedgehog skins t
o do it.

  I waited three days, as the custom is, and then went to comfort (so they call it) his widow. It was not only duty and usage that drove me. Because he had loved her she was, in a way, surely enough the enemy; yet who else in the whole world could now talk to me?

  They brought me into the upper room in her house where she sat at her spinning—very pale, but very calm. Calmer than I. Once I had been surprised that she was so much less beautiful than report had made her. Now, in her later years, she had won a new kind of beauty; it was a proud, still sort of face.

  ‘Lady—Ansit,’ I said, taking both her hands (she had not time to get them away from me), ‘what shall I say to you? How can I speak of him and not say that your loss is indeed without measure? And that’s no comfort. Unless you can think even now that it is better to have had and lost such a husband than to enjoy any man else in the world forever.’

  ‘The Queen does me great honour,’ said Ansit, pulling her hands out of mine so as to stand with them crossed on her breast, her eyes cast down, in the court fashion.

  ‘Oh, dear Lady, un-queen me a little, I beseech you. Is it as if you and I had never met till yesterday? After yours (never think I’d compare them) my loss is greatest. I pray you, your seat again. And your distaff. We shall talk better to that movement. And you will let me sit here beside you?’

  She sat down and resumed her spinning; her face at rest and her lips a little pursed, very housewifely. She would give me no help.

  ‘It was very unlooked for,’ said I. ‘Did you at first see any danger in this sickness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you so? To me Arnom said it ought to have been a light matter.’

  ‘He said that to me, Queen. He said it would be a light matter for a man who had all his strength to fight it.’

  ‘Strength? But the Lord Bardia was a strong man.’

  ‘Yes—as a tree that is eaten away within.’